Reply #14: Karen Kwiatkowski

[seemslikeadream]

Bagged and Tagged!

Thanks to a convenient reorganization by the all-knowing and also wild-eyed Secretary Rumsfeld, this consolidation of budget and product has been further stovepiped into an even more politically manageable entity, the Defense Under Secretary for Intelligence. The office is currently staffed by neoconservative loyalist and Claremont Institute alumni Stephen Cambone and his deputy, Bible-thumping warmonger General "Jerry" Boykin.

One wonders how long the rush to lay the blame in a neat package on the CIA corporate culture doorstep will distract the media from the obvious. With 80% of the cash, 80% of the blame may well flow to the Pentagon. But maybe, just maybe, the Pentagon will be OK.

Work with me here. Let’s think back to the Pentagon behavior during the rush to war in 2002 and 2003….

As I recall, Rumsfeld was calm, slow to act, and full of wisdom. He is the man who insists on facts and hard evidence, or was it absence of evidence? Never mind….

Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz claimed that Iraqis want democracy and we should support them in their goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein from afar, given the lack of intelligence that would push us into any premature involvement in Baghdad. As a student of history, with a bloody painting of the Battle of Antietam dominating his office wall, Wolfowitz also understood the danger of war, the unintended consequences, the cost.

Under Secretary for Policy Doug Feith was telling anyone who would listen that while it is unfortunate that ugly dictatorships and human rights abusers exist in the world, sometimes it is pragmatic to deal with them, instead of bomb and occupy them. Feith would also remind us of all the oil we bought from Iraq under the oil for food program.
more
http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski82.html


The Lie Factory

Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

By Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest
January/February 2004 Issue of Mother Jones

It's a crisp fall day in western Virginia, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and the air is filled with swarms of ladybugs.

So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.

Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence‚ -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ -- including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.

Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full.
But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews‚ -- some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity‚ -- exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
more
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html

That Audacious Richard Clarke

This truth is damaging to that single horse the administration is riding in this election race. The economy, the budget, the debt, veteran's benefits, military readiness, Medicare and social security crises, education, immigration – all are issues where the administration has sorely disappointed conservatives like me, as well as liberals and independents, in every state. If the war on terror horse stumbles, the administration falls.

...

The audacious Mr. Clarke is for all Americans a modern sign of grace, of the power of truth over deception, and of courage over cowardice. May the strong winds blow and the rain come down in Washington, and again save our Republic.

http://militaryweek.com/kk032904.shtml

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